y'all going to laugh, but I really believed it. I drank the kool-aid. this was the mid-00s, a tech company with a motto "don't be evil" still felt daring rather than cringe – for an alienated techie like past me, at least; my politically aware friends tried to warn me; but I didn't realise that Google leveraged its fine-tuned advertising machinery also for recruiting, and I swallowed the whole thing.

I aced the recruiting tests. How could I not? They were traps built for minds like mine. but I didn't understand how they were designed to make me feel proud, special.

and lucky. the Best Place to Work was shiny and different. the offices were called "campi". we got a lil welcome bonus to buy toys for your desk (I got a Kirby). there was a videogame room with Guitar Hero. the colourful rubbery floors felt like the furthest thing from your average office cubicle hell.

#DRM on medical equipment has always been a threat to human health and lives, as well as a violation of our rights, and now DRM on ventilators may actually cost lives: https://u.fsf.org/30n Sign up to learn more about our campaign against DRM: https://u.fsf.org/30j

@vecna when I tried to switch from #Ruby to #Bash (or even #POSIX#shellScripting) to reduce the amount of dependencies, I noticed I focused more on creating smaller programmes that did as little as possible. Take data and output data that could then be processed by one or more other tools.

In other words, I was more creating a set of small tools that used piping to get the task done, rather than a single programme that tried to do it all.